Body-mind continuum
While the Jones’ millions provided the original spark for the CSC, the idea likely never would have gotten off the ground if teaching faculty at the University, particularly in the schools of nursing and medicine, had not been applying contemplative practices for many years already.
The Mindfulness Center, a part of the UVA School of Medicine for the past 15 years, is modeled after a similar school established in the late 1970s at the University of Massachusetts Medical School by professor Jon Kabat-Zinn.
“Mindfulness as we define it is moment to moment non-judgmental awareness, just paying attention to our present moment experience, including our thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations,” explained the center’s director, John Schorling.
Like UMASS’ similar institution, his school employs Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), which essentially strips meditation of its spiritual elements and formulates its practice into an eight week standardized course. Initially created to help medical patients address anxiety caused by their treatments, MBSR is still used for that purpose at UVA, but over the last decade its focus has increasingly expanded to include health care providers.
“Nurses as well as physicians see a lot of suffering, so they have to learn how to take better care of themselves,” said Dorrie Fontaine, the dean of the Nursing School. In 2010, she created the Compassionate Care Initiative “to improve the lives of those with life-threatening illnesses” by focusing on the well-being of those who deliver their care.
Fontaine also recently initiated a four year program for nursing students based around mindfulness. And for two decades, one of her professors has directed the Center for the Study of Complementary and Alternative Therapies (CSCAT). Some examples of her center’s work are a recent study about whether yoga classes that are individualized to fit the needs of depressed women can help them with their disorders. In another exercise, a standard routine of yoga postures and breathing exercises were specifically tailored for heavier older adults with diabetes.
As a result, the nursing school has become the center of contemplative activity at UVA. The school even houses a “resilience room.” Mostly empty and dimly lit, the former classroom occupies a corner of the second floor of McLeod Hall. One wall is lined with yoga mats, blankets and blue blocks and houses weekly yoga and meditation classes.
While her school enjoys a wealth of contemplative activity, the one thing it has lacked is an intellectual foundation for the practices it employs. This was remedied when Sullivan connected her with Germano last year. An authority in Tibetan Buddhism, Germano is also the co-director of UVA’s Tibet Center (as well as of a digital project called SHANTI).
“He’s doing all the kind of undergirding and foundation for the work I’m applying,” said Fontaine.
She is hoping to use CSC funding to allow her faculty members to take some of the religious studies courses on Tibetan Buddhism. “We probably have some of the world’s experts right here in Tibetan studies, and then we have the medicine and health care side,” she said. “There should be a strong marriage.”
The Fontaine-Germano union is part of the radical remake of the Jones’ original Ashtanga-centered concept. According to the center’s new director, John Campbell, he can take “minor credit” for the original idea. A student of Pattabhi Jois’ beginning in the early ’90s, Campbell has known the Joneses since the mid-2000s, when he was asked by them to set up an Ashtanga yoga program at Paul’s Tudor Investment Company for his employees. He ended up running that project for three years.
Although he moved on in 2008, Campbell bumped into Sonia in early 2011 and was told about her daughter who was taking an Ashtanga class at Stanford University. Campbell countered by suggesting that “one exciting way of really truly honoring the great legacy of Jois would be an academic university based research center” focused around the great master’s teachings. The idea intrigued Sonia and Paul, who took it to Sullivan where “it caught fire.”
As initiated by her and expanded upon by Germano—who eventually produced a 60-page white paper on the topic—the CSC was organized to unite all the disparate forces engaged in some form of contemplative practice at the University.
“If you can imagine a Venn diagram where you have a bunch of circles where these centers already exist and then intersect together, the CSC is that particular intersection,” he said.
Obvious choices like Schorling, Fontaine, and Taylor were brought in to help as well as two other religious studies professors, in addition to representatives from the schools of education, intramural recreation (which has taught yoga for years), and psychiatry (as well as a few others). These individuals all united to form the center’s “directorate.”
“It’s a collective governance,” explained Kim Penberthy of the Department of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences, who uses mindfulness therapies in her practice to prevent relapse in alcoholics.
As the center became more well-defined it became clear that there needed to be a director and one with a unique skill set as both academic and practitioner. An international job search was launched in the early part of this year, and Campbell threw his name in the ring.
An incestuous hire, he was also a natural fit. In addition to being one of the few certified Ashtanga teachers in the world, he earned a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2009 with a dissertation on Indian and Tibetan Buddhist Tantric systems.
As the CSC’s director, Campbell will occupy a dual appointment between the department of religious studies where he’ll teach one course a semester focused on yoga traditions, both its history and theory.
“Then along with Germano and others I’ll be playing a very essential role in helping to set up the various programming initiatives we’ll be pursuing at the center,” he said.
What that will be isn’t exactly clear at this point.
“One of the things we are going to find is that it is partly in doing the things that we are going to set out to do that that vision will become more clear,” he said.
Nerve center
In the last decade the practice of meditation has risen to the forefront of science-based fields, like psychology. “People are slapping mindfulness on the front of everything,” Penberthy said.
“It’s the current fad, the zeitgeist,” said Jeff Fracher, a local psychotherapist who also teaches meditation.
It has also penetrated mainstream culture at every level. Congressman Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) published a book called Mindful Nation earlier this year arguing that mindfulness can help us “recapture the American spirit.” In April, the New York Times detailed Google’s meditation-inspired training; the Internet giant has offered a mindfulness class to its employees for years.
What began in the ’60s when a youthful generation worked to escape the strictures of the country’s predominantly Christian moral paradigms has grown in stature as the Baby Boomers have established themselves in their professions. Schorling explained that the penetration of mindfulness and meditation has come as a result of ridding them of religious and spiritual baggage.
“In a large sense this whole explosion in mindfulness is due to the separation out of its religious context,” Schorling explained.
The trouble is that in many ways that separation has also unhinged the practices from their intellectual and theoretical context.
“Now we’re at a point where we think we can potentially make those connections again, and learn more about the traditions from which these practices came,” Schorling said.
The CSC is designed to effect that reunion, linking the practical approach to yoga and meditation employed in the medical sciences to the cultural traditions that created them. Much of that work will happen in the religious studies department. Campbell is on tap to teach a class this fall called Yogic Traditions of South Asia, which is listed in the online syllabus as “an exploration of concepts and practices associated with the Indic categories of yoga and tantra in major religious traditions of South and Himalayan Asia.”
“One of the interesting questions for the center to be engaging in is the degree to which any contemplative practice by definition involves somebody’s way of thinking,” Campbell said. “It taps into and addresses the areas of life which have certain overlap with their belief systems. How do they feel about themselves? How do they view their role in the world? What are their ethical guidelines?”
Contemplative science, then, is a sort of intellectual high-wire act, focusing the rigor of academic discipline on the shimmering horizon where theory meets practice in the human mind.
“One of the center’s main purposes is to approach the practice of these contemplative traditions with a truly scientific program,” he continued. “That’s not to say that somehow you can avoid or strip away elements that in other contexts you would call religious.”
Like meditation, yoga “has been practiced for thousands of years in different religious traditions,” Schorling said. “And at their highest forms if you really want to go deeply into them it’s difficult to do them without practicing in a religious tradition.”
Which brings us back to Ashtanga… Not only will Campbell teach its theory this fall, but he is supervising the installation of actual instructional practice at the University. Even the most basic rendering of Ashtanga involves elements of worship, whether through the recitation of mantras or the assumption of worshipful poses. When I asked local Ashtanga instructor Jennifer Elliott if the practice was spiritual, she answered “absolutely.”
“It affects every part of my life,” she said, and pointed me to religious texts like the Yoga Sutras and the Bhagavad Gita for explanation.
Ashtanga will also be the focus of another, more far-reaching CSC project, again at the Jones’ initiation. The Jois Foundation was approached by the Encinitas School District, in San Diego County, about implementing an Ashtanga-centered K-12 program. If all goes as planned, certified yoga instructors will go into the schools, and in lieu of regular gym class, teach the students yoga. School teachers, who will be trained in meditation styles and yoga poses, will employ them as classroom management techniques. The school’s nutrition practices will also be reevaluated.
“It’s so amazing and visionary,” said Bob Pianta, dean of UVA’s Curry School of Education. “If you can help kids develop skills that reduce their stress and increase their capacity for attention and self-regulation of their behavior in the classroom then you’re likely to increase the value of their experience in that classroom for learning.”
The CSC, with the Curry School in mind, is currently negotiating with the Encinitas School District about the possibility of providing a research component to the program for the 2013-14 school year. If they do, the results could then be used to facilitate similar strategies elsewhere, say, in Albemarle County.
Ashtanga is everywhere so far, but Campbell was eager to downplay its overall influence at the CSC.
“I wouldn’t say Ashtanga is necessarily central,” he told me. “I would say that it is one of a number of different projects that we’ll be involved in and pursuing.”
That said, Campbell is one of the world’s experts in the form, and he is the center’s coordinating director. “There is a special relationship to the Ashtanga absolutely,” he said. “It’s certainly the hope of the donor that Ashtanga will be offered at UVA at some level, and that, yes, it will hopefully be one of its prized possessions. At the same time there is no explicit advocacy of the Ashtanga method above others that the center has embraced.”
Even if there were some sort of “explicit advocacy,” it’s difficult to picture anyone on the directorate objecting. If Jones’ public opposition to Sullivan was not enough to garner criticism from the center’s faculty, then what would be?
That doesn’t mean his June 17 op-ed played well when it first ran.
“Sure, there was concern about how it might impact the center, because emotions were running so high,” Schorling admitted, disclosing that Jones eventually reached out to the directorate and other principals to reassure them of his commitment to the center.
“Paul and the directorate and Terry Sullivan have all had plenty of communications since then, and everything is in good shape in terms of our internal cohesiveness,” Germano said.
Even Fontaine, who was one of Sullivan’s more vocal supporters, holds nothing against the donor. “I, and many others, am grateful to the Joneses for their exceptional generosity to UVA,” she said. “I don’t have concerns about the Joneses and frankly, I am eager for their participation and direction, and know they have a lot to offer.”
“O.K. that was an episode,” added Schorling. “We’ve got really important work to do, let’s move ahead.”
Considering the recent upheaval at the University, the single-minded approach of the CSC faculty is understandable. For them, the center and the emerging field are a huge opportunity. The Jones’ gift, which endows the CSC in perpetuity, gives them a competitive advantage as professionals and reaffirms what has been, in some cases, a career’s worth of academic work.
Even so, the center “has a big piece of work cut out for it,” Campbell said. He only arrived in Charlottesville two weeks ago. Assistant Director Bryan Phillips started working full time a few days later. A tech position was just offered to someone last week.
As the center’s small staff embarks on its journey, there are still many unanswered questions. How will the CSC involve the local community, already rife with yoga, meditation, and alternative healing practices? Nearly everyone I spoke to expressed cautious optimism.
“We’re thrilled to have the CSC come online in this town,” said Pat Coffey, the founder of the Insight Meditation Community of Charlottesville, a group that has taught mindfulness awareness in this area for 15 years. “We’re anxious to see how it develops, and really supportive of it in any way we can. We’re wide open waiting to see how the pieces line up.”
And then there’s the CSC as a test project for President Sullivan’s planned faculty overhaul.
“As we prepare for our future, we may need to recruit professors who can join two schools, or who can work both in a department and an interdisciplinary center,” Sullivan told her faculty last week. “To make this happen, research professors need to think differently about their work. They need to set aside conventional wisdom and look for new, transformative possibilities in the faculties we have.”
At this juncture, the interweaving of disciplines and personnel is what the center extols as its main virtue. “We expect to be able to go far beyond what any individual is doing,” Campbell said. “Simply by linking them all together and leveraging an economy of skill where it becomes possible to identify who’s doing the same thing and helping to direct people to the resources that are already here.”
“When you bring people from different disciplines together you get more interesting work because you kick them out of whatever little groove they’re in,” said Leslie Blackhall, an associate professor of medicine. “It’s not about building some building but about bringing people together at this University and funding them to do innovative things.”
“We’re fortunate that the Joneses gave us the money so we have the ability to move forward,” said Schorling. In his mindful perch at UVA, he has watched the field of contemplation crest to its current high in American culture. “We’re at a tipping point, and we really have the opportunity to be at the front end and edge of that.”